Saturday, April 30, 2016

Pogo,
Etc.“‘The
Democratic Party has to reach a fundamental conclusion: Are we on the
side of working people or big-money interests? Do we stand with the
elderly, the children, the sick and the poor? Or do we stand with
Wall Street speculators and the drug companies and the insurance
companies? … our job is to revitalize American democracy.'”

Overreach:
An investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunal – the
corporate extortion mechanism built into TPP and TtiP – ruled that
Russia had to pay $50 billion to the former stockholders of Yukos
Oil. In that Russia was not a signatory of the trade agreement that
suit was filed under, they're not going to pay.

No
Runs, No Hits, Lots of Errors:
The Fed once again has failed to revive the economy. QE didn't
work. Zero (and occasionally negative) interest rates haven't
worked. Core Personal Conception Expenditures – a measure of
inflation the Fed wants at 2% - has fallen last quarter to a dismal
1.6%. But those who actually buy food when they can afford it have
seen food prices up 10% in the last four months, which translates to
a 30% inflation rate. Let's face it, the central bankers and their
economists haven't the faintest idea what they're doing.

Stacked
Deck: The US,
after investigating the intentional bombing of a civilian hospital in
Afghanistan that killed 42 civilian doctors and their patients, has
ruled that the obvious war crime was, in fact, not a war crime, but
“disciplined” 16 soldiers, including one general. Must have been
investigated by the same lawyers who discovered that torture wasn't
actually torture when
the US does it.

Sooners:
In Oklahoma, if you get your date drunk enough you can do anything
you want and it is not a crime – because sexual assaults “cannot
occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely
unconscious at the time of the sexual act”. I'm not letting my
daughter even drive through the damned state.

Accountability:Shawano,Wisconsin has
adopted an ordinance that will result in fines for parents who cannot
teach their child not bully others. Yeah, a form of bullying.

Friday, April 29, 2016

Gasp:
We knew that the CO2 being taken up by the oceans was driving up the
acidity to the point – currently 30% more acidic than before we
started killing ourselves with progress - that crustaceans such were
having trouble making shells and corals were bleaching. Now we find
that the oxygen levels in the seas are falling; warming oceans absorb
less oxygen and turn over more slowly, leading to depletion at
depths. This deoxygenation poses a major threat to marine life and
is one of the most deadly side-effects from a global warming. No
oxygen in the water, no life in the seas. No life in the seas,
little elsewhere.

Wish
Them Luck: Iran
is calling for the global destruction of weapons of mass destruction.
If they will include religion under that rubric, I'm for it.

Mirrors: The US foreign
policy establishment, in and out of government, Republican, Democrat
and academic is having kittens over Trump's foreign policy speech.
Based on the last thirty years of misadventures and international
disasters, quite where the establishment gets a pulpit to preach from
is a mystery. Name something they've gotten right. Anything? We'd be
a lot better off without their expertise and so would hundreds of
thousand dead civilians.

Boom:
In March the median
annual household income in the
US reached $57,263,
close to the real level of that existed in January 2000. Yeah,
recovery!

Capitalism
Clarified: The
Taiwanese conglomerate building a state-of-the-art steel mill on the
Vietnamese coast explains that the choice is “whether
to catch fish and shrimp” or to build the
mill. Let them eat ball bearings.

Like
A Virgin: Ted
Cruz's Super PAC either transferred or donated (there seem to be
legal differences) but at any rate gave Carly Fiorina's Super PAC
half a million dollars. No, not to get her to
help him lose, but back when Trump was accusing Cruz of having
extra-marital affairs and one of Carly's campaign workers was rumored
to be involved. This is the only known
instance of a candidate
giving
an opponent half a million bucks.

Hide
In Plain Sight:
The National Security Agency is so busy scooping up every tweet,
text, email and phone conversation that is overwhelmed and cannot
separate the wheat from the chaff. If there is any wheat, that is.

Job
Well Done:
Volkswagen's departing CEO will get a $8.2 million goodbye gift in
honor of his
years and years of deceitful marketing. Cheap compared to the
estimated $18 billion the deliberate fraud will end up costing the
stockholders.

Quoted:“Many
Americans have almost no savings, so they have barely any wealth.
Two-thirds live paycheck to paycheck.”

Right
Hand Washes Left:
Germany is going to underwrite the sales of new electric cars to the
tune of €1bn. Maybe they could take the money from the profits
that VW, Audi and others have made cheating on diesel emissions.

Making
Haste Slowly:
The Fed now sees real GDP growth in 1Q2016 as 0.6%, maybe
even 0.5%, not the puny 0.4% previously reported. Too bad it
seems based on Consumer
spending, largely on services,

Succinctly:“I have never worked
with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” John
Boehner describing Ted Cruz.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

“This
is not capitalism; this is mere plunder by a powerful few. We do not
have 'capitalism.' We have a corrupt system of kleptocracy ruled over
by the big money power of a relatively few.” Jesse

-------------

Smoke/Fire:
Puerto Rico will cut its minimum wage to $4.25 an hour. Because
beggaring the worker is the best way to pay back Wall Street bond
holders.
Just ask Argentina.

Creativity
Abounds:Apparently a lot of
liberal arts majors are getting jobs as creative artists in S&P
500 companies' accounting departments, which would explain why 90% of
them no longer use Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in
reporting earnings results. 380 of the Non-GAAP reports claimed net
income to be up 6.6%, while using GAAP showed the same companies' net
income declined 11%.

Europe
Running Out Of Mattresses:
Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch behemoth, is offering
€300 million of debt maturing in 2020, with a zero interest coupon.
The potential four year yield will be 0.06%.

Happy
Motoring:97%
of all new diesel cars exceed official pollution limits, some by as
much as 600%. VW
was giving power-point
lectures
on how to foil emissions tests back in 2006, and Mitsubishi says
if first found ways to beat the tests
25 years ago.

Quoted:
“Voters know at a gut level that our system of global capitalism is
working mainly for the 1 %, not the 99 %. That’s a large part of
why both Sanders and Trump have done well, because they tap into that
truth, albeit in different ways. The Panama Papers illuminate a key
aspect of why the system isn’t working–because globalization has
allowed the capital and assets of the 1 % to travel freely, while
those of the 99 % cannot.”

Politics
101: In the US
political process should the interests of the voters or the interest
of the party prevail? Party, obviously. After all this is not a
democracy. Wasn't intended to be. That's
why over half of us think the system is crooked,
it is.

A
Bite Out Of The Apple:
Poor, failing Apple; it only made $10.5 billion in profit in the
last fiscal quarter and only has $233 billion in cash sitting around
after its gross profit margin slipped from 40.8 cents on the dollar
to 39.4 cents. How's
it supposed to survive at such low levels of greed to goodness?

Words
& Deeds:
Dennis Hastert, back when his full name was Speaker of The House
Dennis Hastert, wanted to “put repeat child molesters in jail for
the rest of their lives.” When he was sentenced to 15 months in
jail for hiding the
money he used to hide his abuse
of children for
decades, he cried and begged for leniency. If
his first name wasn't “Former House Speaker” how many years would
he have gotten? Maybe he gets
the volume discount, sort of like a Catholic priest?

Question
For Graduates:
What would you rather do with your life, work in an office cubicle or
sail around the world with a cat?

Compassion:
David Cameron's conservatives have refused to accept 3,000
unaccompanied refugee children stranded in camps in Europe into the
country. But they
will continue to ship arms to Saudi Arabia, which has earned them
£2.8billion since the destruction of Yemen began.

Fair
And Balanced:
On 9/11 Saudi terrorists killed 3,000 Americans. Since then the US
has killed over 1.3 million civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan.

Credit
Where Credit Is Due:
Nebraska has abolished civil forfeiture, the appalling process that
lets the cops steal your money, house and car for no reason
whatsoever. Good on them.

Auction:
Charles Koch says that Trump and Cruz are terrible role models and
he will not support their run for the presidency. Plus he doesn't
own them. He notes that Hillary, based on her long-standing
relationship with Wall Street, would be a better president
because she stays bought.

Monday, April 25, 2016

Being
fresh back from captivity among the civilized, my loathing for any
number of our leaders seems fresh and surprising. But after a few
days I will revert to being, like you, resigned to the way the world.

Amusingly,
the US now claims that it
had understated the number of collaterally damaged dead civilians
in US air strikes in Iraq and Syria, and that there had actually been
42. This does not, obviously, include the hundreds of thousands of
collaterally
dead
and wounded civilians previously inflicted on innocents
in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya...

The
circus
over the – gasp! - Saudi involvement in, planning of and financing
of both Ossma Ben Laden and the 9/11 attackers is hard to understand.
(That some of the
9/11 hijackers lived with an FBI informant prior to the attack is
not being much mentioned.)It has been obvious to all since the day of
the attacks the the Saudis were deeply involved. That's what is in
the 28 pages totally removed from the 9/11 report. Ask any of the
members of the commission who produced it. On top of that there is
not the “Document
17” which includes documentary evidence of the direct
involvement
of the Saudi Embassy in Washington DC in the tragedy. And Seymour
Hersh's report that the
Saudi government paid Pakistan hundreds of millions of dollars to
hide Ben Laden seems to be another solid piece of reporting that will
be ignored.

Why
does the US continue to submit meekly to the Saudis? It is not the
oil – we seem to have plenty. It is not their usefulness as an
ally, they are scorpions in the bed. What to the Saudis have?
Money. And a lot of blackmail material in the form of past dirty
deeds and in the form of $800
billion in treasury notes that they threaten to
sell if Obama
doesn't
behave.

Echo
Chamber:
Police in Brazil have “swept away” Brazil's street children as
they pretty up the place for the Olympics. “Swept away” - a
rather prettily vague term, not nearly as descriptive as the mass
killings of “vagrants” by South Korean authorities before the
1988 Olympics.

Bad
Idea:
The Native American Council has offered amnesty to 220 million
undocumented whites currently occupying their country.

Aye,
There's The Rub:
Research continues to find that our ubiquitous use of anti-bacterial
soaps does more harm than good, to us, to those around us and to the
environment. Worst damage is the impetus these compounds give to the
development of bacteria resistant to antibiotics, making relatively
harmless bacteria into relatively deadly ones.

Friends
In High Places:Bob
Graham, former Florida governor, Democratic U.S. Senator and chair of
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says the Select
Committee's secret report has 28 excised pages detailing the
“substantial” support the 9/11 hijackers received from an
organized network financed by the Saudis. He personally finds it “
implausible to believe that 19 people, most of whom didn't speak
English, most of whom had never been in the United States before,
many didn't have a high school education, could have carried out such
a complicated task without some support from within the United
States.”

A
New Spin On Global Warming:
Greenland has lost so much ice – over 600 trillion pounds a year
of late – that it is changing the distribution of weight on the
Earth, which is changing the way the Earth wobbles on its axis. The
shift is harmless, but interesting.

Downsized:
The homeless in
Los Angeles cannot,
by law, possess more stuff than can be stuffed into a 60-gallon
trashcan. Presumably the city will be issuing transhcans, or perhaps
setting up sizing boxes like the ones for carry-ons at the airport.
The new law also instructs the police to confiscate homeless people's
tents from public property if they are not taken down at daylight.

Assume
A Cow Is A Circle:
Blinding us with numbers, Wharton Business School Professor Olivia
Mitchell assures us that Social Security going to experience a $28
trillion shortfall. This is technically possible only if Social
Security
exists as an ongoing program
for forever. Actually for ever and ever. For my lifetime and your
lifetime and the lifetime of my grandchildren, taxing
all income
at the current rate will make the program solvent.
End of story.

A
Bit Fit:
As a nation of individuals, we have readily accepted that we are
personally responsible for our own wellbeing. It's not true, of
course. Scientists can do a good job of evaluating the risks and
benefits of this or that drug or exercise for large groups and
populations, but translating the group experience to the individual
is chancy at best. Society would be better off if we united to
address the environmental factors that damage our health and paid a
lot less attention to questionable “lifestyle”changes. As long
as factors outside of the individual are part of the causal chain
that produces health, unless we do something about these factors, no
amount of lifestyle modification is going to lower the burden of
disease in populations. Sure, there are individual things you can do
– stop smoking, exercise more, eat healthy – but before you marry
a Fitbit, ask yourself how many diet books you've bought.

Friday, April 8, 2016

Getting
Out Of The Vote:Campaigning
for his wife in Philadelphia,Bill
Clinton says Black Lives Matter activists are defending murderers .
He also defended Mrs Clinton's use of the word “super predators”
to describe black youth. This
was all part of his attempt to explain that his signing the draconian
mandatory sentencing bill that has decimated black youth was a
necessary compromise with the Republicans, the same sort of necessary
compromise Hillary says will be needed to further gut welfare and
whittle away at Social Security. No wonder that a McClatchy-Marist
poll shows Sanders edging Clinton nationally, 49% to 47%. She
has been wrong on the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free
trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality,
debt and income inequality, among
others. That's also why 25%
of Sanders voters will not back Clinton if she's the nominee.

Free
College Now:
The US Department of Education reports that more than 40% of
Americans who borrowed money from the government to go to college are
not paying or are behind on repaying the $200 billion they owe. This
is not quite what Sanders has in mind when he advocates tuition-free
public colleges.

Roll
Model: When
the Catholic Dioceses of St. Louis wanted to illustrate the power and
scope of Catholic leadership in the area, one of the twelve men they
chose to feature was former Bishop Robert Flynn who was convicted in
connection with sex abuse in the church.

Castor
Oil:
Economists (and oligarchs and CEOs and politicians) keep justifying
“free trade” agreements by pointing out that these treaties have
resulted in “huge improvements in living standards among the poor
in the developing world.” Maybe so, but decades of stagnating
wages and vanishing jobs may have boosted corporate profits, but they
haven't put food on the table in Detroit. Time to stop the nonsense
and find a way to encourage others without harming our own.

Short
Form: One of
the most convincing arguments if favor of higher estate taxes is
Donald Trump.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

An
Example:
The Treasury has new rules aimed at curbing the rush of US companies
to merge with strawish foreign dogs and then pretend that the merged
company, conveniently out of the IRS' reach, is now in Can't-Touch-Me
land. They went into effect on April
4th and
have already put a stop to the
Pfizer/Allegan $160 billion deal. That Obama would take on what
would have been the world's largest pharmaceutical
company over something as trivial as paying US taxes makes one wonder
what is really going on and if the Republican Congress will
let this assault on profits continue.

Quite
So Story:
“American
People To Blame For Current State Of Politics...” True.
Just as it was a mistake to turn the running of companies over to
the self-interest of CEOs, letting our hired hands in Washington and
the statehouses
and all those city halls have their own way, unsupervised for so
long, has gelded us.

Yes,
Mother:
Hillary says she has “had enough” of Bernie Sanders
impertinence and he'd better toe the line from now on or she'll send
him to bed without any supper. If she can't stand a little gentle
poking from Bernie, wait 'til she has to face Trump's assaults on a
daily basis.

Ins
And Outs:
Renewable energies – mainly wind and solar – are eclipsing
traditional fossil fuels in the hearts of investors. In 2015,
renewables garnered some $250 billion in new investment, double the
$125 fossil fuels garnered. Even
Scotland, which plans to finance independence with North Sea oil,
got 57.7% of its domestic energy consumption from renewables last
year. Maybe the danger is not peak oil but peak
oil investment. Might
think about this as you set up the kid's college fund.

The
New South:Maine
has
joined the slave states and is putting a 'Christian' initiative on
the ballot this fall which would strip gay rights from Maine's Human
Rights Act.Like
North Carolina's it would strip “sexual orientation” of legal
protection from discrimination – but doesn't specify which sexual
orientation, so refusing to rent to a married heterosexual couple
would be just fine. These people never think things through,
fortunately.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Your
response to my hasty and ill-conceived resignation – filled as it
has been with expressions of appreciation, affection and some degree
of addiction - has swayed me nearly as much as my spouse's
insistence that I stop bombarding her with puns, sage observations
and wry insights else she would make up the bed in the Other Room.

So
here's the deal. I'll resume posting SAR on most weekdays, with
content no longer than I easily can slip into the day. Photographic
Parting Shots and Pornographs will be occasional treats.

But
I will not impose requirements on myself regarding the seriousness or
relative importance of the items selected for comment. Let's face
it, no one wants to hear about global warming – we're toast and
there's really nothing more to say. Or the death of democracy –
the corpse is cold and the mourning done. That the rich have already
inherited the earth is incontestable and only an organized attempt at
their overthrow would be worth comment. And so on.

Pretty
much, I'm freeing myself from the rules I imposed on myself. You are
all invited along for the ride.

And
before you get all comfortable, I'm going on vacation, so between now
and the end of the month, posting will be... occasional.

What
really got this reconsideration started was this item:

Give
'em A Hand: Research
suggests that ejaculation may lower the risk of prostate cancer.

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Friday, April 1, 2016

“The
Republican Party today is a joke maintained by the media.” Bernie
Sanders

Greasing
The Wheels:
Halliburton, Rolls-Royce, Samsung, Hyundai, Leighton Holdings and
lots more have been identified as practicing
capitalism by bribing their way into contracts, creating
political instability, turning citizens against their governments,
and fueling the rage that would erupt during the Arab Spring — and
be exploited by terrorist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Companies and
individuals pay at least $1 trillion in bribes to public sector
officials annually. That's
what public service is all about.

The
Money Quote:“America’s
infrastructure is so bad the self-driving cars can’t even find the
lanes on the road”. Experts
estimate that 65% of US roads are in poor condition, and rate the US
transportation infrastructure as, at best, 12th
in the world.

Knock
Knock:In
an attack on Sanders, Clinton
insists
that
Americans cannot
“hold out for the perfect,” then
offers
herself as being less than perfect. Far less.

The
New Economy:
One way of looking at the new, gig, Uberized economy is that it is
something it is not – it is not new and it is not exciting and we
certainly hope it is not the future – for nearly all of the growth
in employment in the US in the last decade has been in the use of
self-employed contractors and 'temps'. Day laborers, one and all; no
benefits, no future, no power.

Ribbons,
Booties?
Mississippi, like a bunch of the other slave states, has passed a law
making it explicitly legal for both private and public sectors to
discriminate against LGBT people. It is not clear what will happen
if they chose to refuse service to a gay who turns out not to be gay.
How are the good people of Mississippi to know who they are to
discriminate against, now that color alone won't do? Will the
targets be required to wear different colored ribbons, or patches?

If
Only: The FTC
is suing VW for over $15 billion for its false advertising - when
will they get around to Trump and Cruz?

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.